Tag Archives: Crime

News

New CDC study on gun violence that Obama requested undermines gun control

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Here’s an article about the CDC study from the leftist Slate magazine. (H/T ECM)

First – Obama ordered this study, and it was performed by an agency under his control – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The article says:

Earlier this year, President Obama ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to assess the existing research on gun violence and recommend future studies. That report, prepared by the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council, is now complete. Its findings won’t entirely please the Obama administration or the NRA, but all of us should consider them.

The article explains 10 findings of the report.

Here are a few of them:

2. Most indices of crime and gun violence are getting better, not worse. “Overall crime rates have declined in the past decade, and violent crimes, including homicides specifically, have declined in the past 5 years,” the report notes. “Between 2005 and 2010, the percentage of firearm-related violent victimizations remained generally stable.” Meanwhile, “firearm-related death rates for youth ages 15 to 19 declined from 1994 to 2009.” Accidents are down, too: “Unintentional firearm-related deaths have steadily declined during the past century. The number of unintentional deaths due to firearm-related incidents accounted for less than 1 percent of all unintentional fatalities in 2010.”

5. Mass shootings aren’t the problem. “The number of public mass shootings of the type that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School accounted for a very small fraction of all firearm-related deaths,” says the report. “Since 1983 there have been 78 events in which 4 or more individuals were killed by a single perpetrator in 1 day in the United States, resulting in 547 victims and 476 injured persons.” Compare that with the 335,000 gun deaths between 2000 and 2010 alone.

7. Guns are used for self-defense often and effectively. “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year … in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008,” says the report. The three million figure is probably high, “based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys.” But a much lower estimate of 108,000 also seems fishy, “because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.” Furthermore, “Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.”

10. It isn’t true that most gun acquisitions by criminals can be blamed on a few bad dealers. The report concedes that in 1998, “1,020 of 83,272 federally licensed retailers (1.2 percent) accounted for 57.4 percent of all guns traced by the ATF.” However, “Gun sales are also relatively concentrated; approximately 15 percent of retailers request 80 percent of background checks on gun buyers conducted by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.” Researchers have found that “the share of crime gun traces attributed to these few dealers only slightly exceeded their share of handgun sales, which are almost equally concentrated among a few dealers.” Volume, not laxity, drives the number of ill-fated sales.

The findings of the CDC study are not aligned with either side of the gun control debate, but considering the source (an agency of the Obama administration), I expect them to be even more liberal than the real state of affairs.

A better place to look for the truth about guns is in the academic literature. Here are two books I really like for that.

Both of those books make the case that permitting law-abiding citizens to own firearms for self-defense reduces rates of gun violence.

News

Evangelicals for Biblical Immigration opposes Gang of Eight amnesty bill

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Breitbart News reports on a new evangelical group that opposes the Senate’s amnesty bill.

Excerpt:

On Friday, Evangelicals for Biblical Immigration, an informal group of well-respected evangelical Christians announced its opposition to the Gang of Eight immigration bill. The group, recently organized by Kelly Monroe Kullberg, founder of the Veritas Forum and co-author and editor of Finding God at Harvard, featured a letter written to members of Congress by Kullberg outlining the Biblical principles on which opposition to the bill is based on its website and Facebook page.

The Gang of 8 bill, Kullberg writes in her letter, “is flawed to the point of being unworkable. Please, scrap it and start over.” She writes that “as a citizen in the Heartland, I have a simple request of the Senate: Please stop. Please, no more surprises. Rather, rebuild our trust.”

“There seems to be great confusion about what the bill means and how it will be implemented,” she argues. “Rushing to a vote, once again, is not wise.”

Evangelicals for Biblical Immigration’s opposition to the Gang of Eight bill comes just two weeks after a George Soros-backed group, the Evangelical Immigration Table, launched a $250,000 media campaign in support of the bill’s passage.

But Kullberg wants the Senate to know that American citizens “are not willing to ‘pass the bill so that [we] can find out what is in it.’ We The People never were willing to act so immorally, so foolishly, and certainly not now,” she writes. “This is no time for another mystery bill that will forever change the nation we love and have the duty to steward.”

“Our future,” Kullberg argues, “should not be shaped by those who break laws but by those who keep laws. Let’s learn to care for both the citizen and the foreigner, and do this wisely with no surprises. Another ‘Obamacare’ will break our back as a nation.”

You can read a letter that Kelly wrote about the immigration bill.

It’s nice to see a group of authentic evangelicals stepping up to make clear what the Bible says about immigration.

But what about the fake Soros-funded “Evangelical Immigration Table” group?

Breitbart News explains more about them:

Lynne Hybels… has become a national voice for the front group for the George Soros funded National Immigration Forum, a leading advocate for the crony capitalist laden Schumer-Rubio “Gang of Eight” immigration bill.

Ms. Hybels was not only featured at a Thursday press conference at which the front group, Evangelical Immigration Table, announced the launch of a $250,000 ad campaign designed to pressure members of Congress to vote in favor of the “Gang of Eight” bill, she provides the narrative voice on one of the national radio advertisements included in the campaign. You can hear her make the case for her understanding of immigration reform here  Note that Ms. Hybels also states the disclaimer at the end of the ad “paid for by the Evangelical Immigration Table. ”

However, Breitbart News reported on Sunday that the Evangelical Immigration Table does not exist as a legal entity.  On Monday, Breitbart News reported that “Evangelicals Mislead on Funding of Immigration Ads.” Though the ads that are now airing in 13 states contain a disclaimer that they are paid for by the Evangelical Immigration Table, however, the ads were actually paid for by the Soros-funded National Immigration Forum.

Lynne Hybels blogs at the leftist Sojourners blog. Sojourners is the group run by Jim Wallis, that also accepts massive donations from the atheist George Soros. Her husband Bill Hybels introduced Barack Obama at a speech. Lynne Hybels has previously worked for the pro-infanticide, pro-gay-marriage Barack Obama as a member of his outreach team to faith-based community groups. The Soros-backed pro-amnesty group also has connections to Marxist Jim Wallis, who backed the pro-infanticide, pro-gay-marriage Obama in the  Presidential election. George Soros, of course, is a self-proclaimed atheist, and he supports abortion and gay marriage, just like Obama and his supporters.

Commentary

Heather McDonald: the real risks of the Senate immigration amnesty bill

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Here’s a post from the moderate Manhattan Institute about the Senate immigration bill. (H/T Doug Ross)

No border enforcement:

Mickey Kaus has demolished the Senate bill’s central claim: that it makes border security a precondition for the granting of permanent-resident status. In fact, the enforcement goals consist of empty promises; nothing actually hangs on their achievement or requires that they ever be met. Immigrant advocate Frank Sharry candidly echoed Kaus’s analysis in the Wall Street Journal: “The triggers [for obtaining green cards] are based on developing plans and spending money, not on reaching that effectiveness, which is really quite clever.”

Amnesty almost immediately:

But the legislation’s most critical amnesty comes right away, before even the pretense of beefed-up security. Illegal aliens will get their illegal status removed six months after the bill is passed upon payment of $500. The formerly illegal aliens will be allowed to remain in the country legally, under so-called “probationary status,” for ten years (while those who wish to enter the country legally wait patiently in their home countries for permission to enter).

Criminals are eligible for amnesty:

Not one amnesty proposal has ever required a clean criminal record to qualify. The current bill allows aliens with two misdemeanor convictions to legalize. Given the incessant pressures on district attorneys to accept a plea in exchange for downgrading the crime charged and to ignore most arrests entirely, it takes considerable effort to rack up two misdemeanor convictions—whether by dealing drugs, assaulting fellow gangbangers, stealing, or tagging. The bill’s authors apparently think that staying on the right side of the law is an insuperable burden and that having a criminal record is an ordinary part of being an American.

Permanent Democrat majority:

The political effects of the proposed amnesty won’t benefit the GOP, whatever the party’s hopes might be. Hispanics will not shift their vote to Republicans in the next presidential election unless Republicans promote the same big-government programs, such as Obamacare, that attract Hispanics to the Democratic Party in the first place.

Hurts the poorest Americans:

Harvard economist George Borjas has recently estimated that low-skilled American workers already suffer wage losses of $402 billion a year because of immigrant labor, a sum that does not include the costs to taxpayers of welfare paid to low-skill immigrant workers and their children. Amnesty proponents should explain how providing legal status to millions of illegal aliens will affect the job prospects of the poorest Americans.

Massive burden to taxpayers:

Reconfiguring immigration priorities is crucial, because many children of unskilled immigrants are assimilating into the underclass. They are also placing enormous burdens on the nation’s schools. California governor Jerry Brown proposes to redirect state taxpayer dollars from middle-class schools to those with high proportions of “English learners,” because Hispanic students lag so far behind whites and Asians. Most of these “English learners” were born and raised in the U.S. but are characterized as non-native speakers because their academic language skills are so low. Nationally, only 18 percent of Hispanic eighth-graders read at or above proficiency levels, according to the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Because of their low academic achievement (and their high rates of illegitimacy), second- and third-generation Hispanics rely on government welfare programs far more than native-born whites.

I just wanted to be clear with everyone. I am in favor of legal immigration and even automatic green cards for skilled workers – especially in Information Technology. Skilled workers who come here legally and work here for 6 years without committing any crimes should get an automatic green card. Skilled immigrants pay more in taxes than they take from welfare programs. But this immigration bill does nothing for skilled immigrants. It’s targeting unskilled immigrants who have already broken the law by coming here illegally and forcing enormous costs on taxpayers. We already have a $17 trillion debt and it’s going up by a trillion every year. We can’t afford this amnesty bill.